When life gets a bit tough, one of the things we all want to do is focus on ourselves – to make things better.  But somehow, the more self-absorbed we become, the worse it ends up feeling.   

It’s great to be with you again today. Ever had that ‘I’m feeling down’ kind of feeling? Just one part of our lives isn’t quite right and it can rob us of life and joy and peace and vibrancy. Just one relationship, one situation, one aspect of life can be a ‘wet blanket’ over the whole lot. And part of the problem is that we become all self-absorbed over that one thing, it’s like, until we can deal with that one issue that’s all we can think about.

When we’re freezing cold all we just want to do is get warm, when we’re thirsty we just need a drink, when we’re in our own personal little prison cell we just need to get out. Some people spend years in being self-absorbed over one issue and you know what? They’ve missed out on life. I’ve seen it happen over and over again and I think to myself, “Well, that makes sense. That’s a good idea or maybe we should all try that.” Yeah right! So how do we deal with that?

We can feel as though we’re in our own personal prison cell. Maybe you’re caring for someone who has been sick for years or you have a loved one with Alzheimer’s or a sickness or disability or your husband or wife just isn’t what you want them to be, or your kid is on drugs or goes astray, or you’re in a wheelchair, I mean the list is endless, isn’t it?

Sometimes that’s the reality, now I’m not making light, these things aren’t trivial, they’re a big deal but sometimes it’s just the reality, we can’t change it, we can’t remove the prison walls, we have to live life anyway. I wonder if you’ve been struggling with something like that and it’s just one area of your life that’s not working for you. Maybe it’s been going on for a week or a month; maybe it’s been going on for years.

I wonder whether today, we couldn’t together, make a decision. Decide to live life to the full no matter what life throws at us, no matter what the prison walls look like. To live life in a way that when we get to the end of it, no matter what happened, we can look back and say, ‘You know something, I’ve lived the most outrageously amazing life with no regrets.’ Regret’s a funny thing. Sometimes we think that regret is about the external things, things that we can’t control. Well maybe, but I think more than anything, regret is about our lost opportunities.

You see life can take a turn this way or that. Tomorrow, I could end up a quadriplegic, that would be terrible but what would I do with that? Would I sit there for the rest of my life and just not live life? Or would I say, ‘Well that’s what’s happened to me, I have to move on, I have to live life.’ My hunch is if I became a quadriplegic tomorrow and I got to the end of my life, the thing that I would regret the most is not becoming a quadriplegic; the thing that I would regret was if I gave up on life.

The things that we tend to regret are our own lost opportunities. It’s when we respond to something badly and we look back and think, ‘Oh, I could have responded better. I could have actually lived life.’ Wouldn’t it be terrible if we got to the end and we had huge regrets? And so when there’s something going on in our life and it feels like a prison cell, I think we need a radical shift, a shift away from my problems to my reaction and that’s what we’re looking at this week, a letter from someone called Paul, on death row. It’s a letter that he wrote in a Roman prison in the 1st Century AD, to some buddies of his in a Church at Philippi and he said to them, here he is on death row, he said, ‘My friends, this is my prayer for you, that your love may overflow more and more as you get to know Jesus.’ This is a guy on death row and he’s using language of abundance, ‘Overflow more and more as you get to know Jesus.’

What’s going on inside Paul? He’s got Jesus in him. He’s got the Spirit of God in him and the focus is off himself and off his own problems, onto his friends. He can talk abundance language because he’s got an abundance of Jesus happening in him, he can’t help it. He overflows the love of God.

I don’t know about you but I could never do that until I had a relationship with Jesus. I used to hate it when other people would succeed around me. Their success was my loss. But now, now in a relationship with Jesus, my hearts full to overflow, there’s more than enough love and grace and comfort and peace and credit to go around, and that’s what’s going on with Paul here. Paul’s got Jesus and so he has this overflow in his heart, his love and his concern for his friends.

Jesus does that. It’s a radical shift in focus and it takes the focus off me out onto others, off you out onto others. That is a huge shift. And truly, I don’t think we could do that shift without a relationship with God through Jesus Christ.

We have a volunteer, here at Christianityworks; every program that I record, both this program A Different Perspective and a much longer program, a half hour program called Christianityworks, each audio track is taken and we have some volunteers who type up the transcripts. And so those transcripts are then posted onto our internet site and people from right around the world read those transcripts, pull them down, copy them and use them in their lives.

And this volunteer, I won’t use her name but she suffers from Agoraphobia. So she’s in a prison of her own. Agoraphobia is a condition where you have a fear of wide-open spaces and so by and large, she doesn’t go out of the house much. And she had a heart to do things for other people so when we sent a letter around to many of our supporters, the people who help keep this program on air and we said, “We’re looking for a handful of volunteers, people who have a PC and internet access, doesn’t matter where you are in the world, we just needed some people to type the transcripts for our website.” And so she does that now and here is this woman who struggles in a prison with something that you and I can’t understand, she probably can’t understand either and yet she’s taken the focus off herself and she, through what she is doing in her home, taking these audio tracks and typing them up into text transcripts is blessing people right around the world. Just recently we had an email from a woman in Rowanda who listens to this program there in Rowanda and she’s using those transcripts to lead a Bible study in a woman’s group in her Church.

Isn’t it amazing what happens when in God’s power we take the focus off ourselves and put it on other people, no matter what’s going on in our lives and it’s not a ‘head’ attitude, it’s a ‘heart’ attitude. When I speak to this woman who volunteers with us she says, ‘What an incredible blessing it is.’ When we get the focus off ourselves and we start doing things for other people out of the abundance of the love that Jesus puts in our hearts – oh wow that is awesome. Can I encourage you? If you’ve got a Bible get it out and open it up towards the end of the New Testament and read this short letter of Paul to the Philippians. It gives you a whole new outlook on life because the context is this wonderful letter is written by a man in a dungeon on death row. He is a political prisoner chained to a guard and he says, ‘Man, my prayer for you is that your love would overflow more and more as you get to know Jesus.’

You feeling down, circumstances are weighing you down? Get close to Jesus, real close, do something for someone else, use your gifts and your abilities, and when we stop being self-absorbed all of a sudden we start getting on with life.